Trying to understand Doug Michels.

On June 12, a man named Doug Michels died while climbing to a whale observation point in Eden Bay, Australia. Michels had studied architecture and design at Yale and Harvard, had spent a few years working as a designer for Philip Johnson, and taught at various institutions. He lived in Houston, and was in Australia working as a consultant on a new documentary film. The accident took place just a few weeks shy of his 60th birthday.

That's pretty much all the newspaper obituaries had to say, though a few did mention, almost as an afterthought, that Michels was the designer behind the Cadillac Ranch?that row of 10 old caddies buried nose first, tail fins to the sky, near Amarillo TX.

You don't expect to get much beyond that in an obituary. The simple, clean facts. Where they lived, where they were when they died, how old they were, how it happened. Maybe a sentence or two about something that person did while he was alive. The solid, objective reasons why the deceased should be remembered by anyone who didn't know them personally.

I didn't know Doug Michels personally. I didn't even recognize the name straightaway when I heard the news that he had died. Growing up, though, I certainly remember reading about some of the things that he was doing as part of Ant Farm?the art and design collective he'd formed with Chip Lord in the mid-60s. Along with the Cadillac Ranch, there was "Media Burn," in which a Cadillac was driven through a wall of burning televisions. Ant Farm also reenacted the Kennedy assassination in Dallas, designed and built the futuristic (and undeniably phallic) House of the Century, occupied a vending machine room in a corporate complex in Houston, and undertook hundreds of other projects both large and small that were half art, half science, half social commentary and half outright prank.

About 10 days after the news broke that Michels had died, I received a long note from a friend in San Francisco named Homer. It didn't surprise me at all to learn that he was a friend of Michels'?he was an unconventional sort himself who, over the years, had worked with a number of people (writers, filmmakers, musicians, artists of every stripe) who were doing provocative and often unclassifiable things. In the note, he told me a few things about Doug Michels that didn't make it into the newspapers.

"Doug," he wrote, "was undoubtedly one of the most articulate, intelligent, charismatic and confident humans I've ever known. He was also the most aggressively, relentlessly optimistic person, in regard to the Future, I ever met." That was the key?this obsession Michels had with the future. He even signed off on his correspondences with the phrase, "See you in the Future."

That obsession, as expressed in the projects undertaken by Ant Farm, tended to focus on automobiles more than anything else. There were car installations and car performances. The car was a symbol of future possibility, where form and function came together, full of beauty and hope.

"The collective ideals embraced by Ant Farm," Homer wrote, "were born in the 50s, a time when the future seemed limitless, and then tempered in the 60s, a time when everyone under 30 knew we could do it better." Doug, he explained, seemed to embody both that sense of limitless possibility and that sense of eternal optimism.

"Perhaps nothing spoke to these values more than cars?and nothing gave visual form to these feelings more than the sleekly elegant 'Cars of the Future' designed by automakers, most notably Ford, in the 1950s." (And which can still be seen nowadays each spring at the New York International Auto Show.)

Michels incorporated the same ideas that went into designing those cars into his House of the Century?which symbolized a bright, sleek future in which we could drive our homes, or live in our cars (but in a good way). It was all very exciting and invigorating, this rushing headlong toward a glorious, streamlined future we'd always read about and seen in the movies. Everyone would be wearing tunics.

But the future we eventually reached didn't end up resembling the future we?or Michels?had hoped it would. Not by a long shot. Instead of Doug's dream machines, we have Hummers and SUVs?"the most graceless collection of vehicles to yet infect the planet," Homer wrote. And instead of living in homes that resemble in any way his House of the Century, we live in increasingly featureless, shoddy boxes that are designed to be as disposable as a pair of sneakers.

Meanwhile, as the real future made its wheezing self evident everywhere else, down near Angleton, TX, the House of the Century?designed and built in 1972 not just to be elegant and striking, but also to withstand anything nature could throw at it?was slowly sinking into a swamp, "a design feature that greatly added to its picturesque quality, but failed to consider the floods that periodically ravage that part of Texas." The latest, and probably last residents of the 30-year-old House of the Century, Homer wrote, "are mosquitoes, snakes, owls and a few turtles."

Ant Farm made big plans and, sadly, met with big disappointments, the final straw being the 1978 fire that tore through their San Francisco studio. Although they were able to save 90 percent of their archives?the videotapes, photos and recordings they'd made of their projects?everything else was lost, and Ant Farm soon disbanded.

Along with all the successes, there were also a number of tragedies in Michels' personal life (including a failed marriage), but to hear it told, he was always moving on to whatever was next, and there was always something next.

That's why he was in Australia in June. The documentary film he was consulting on at the time of his death was The Killers of Eden, based on the true story of a pod of killer whales who, back in the 1920s, helped a whaler find and slaughter other whales. It would make sense that Michels would be asked to work on the project, given his lifelong obsession with cetaceans, especially dolphins. Even Cadillac Ranch, he often explained, was inspired by dolphins.

He was happy to be in Australia, and it was a good place for him to be. He'd once staged an all-automobile production of Carmen in the parking lot of the Sydney Opera House. It had also been home to a failed Ant Farm attempt to open up communications lines between humans and dolphins.

Throughout his life, Michels had maintained contact with a wide circle of friends, Homer told me, and in the days immediately following Doug's passing, he received dozens upon dozens of emails from people who knew Doug, all of them sharing their memories. There's nothing terribly unusual in any of that (except maybe the sheer volume). A year ago, when my friend Don Gilbert died, the same sort of thing happened. Don knew a lot of people, and though there was no organized mailing list, we seemed to find each other, somehow.

In the case of Doug Michels, though, things took an odd turn. On the day Doug died, Homer received a letter from him. That in itself was an odd thing, given that he had rarely received anything beyond a postcard or an email from him before.

"To make things a little stranger," he wrote, "during the virtual wake that went on this week, quite a few people mentioned that they had received some kind of correspondence that Doug had sent from Australia just before he died. One person even attached her letter to the email?it was identical to mine. Hand written on 'Killer Whale Museum' stationery, Doug had apparently Xeroxed the original, then wrote in the 'Dear...' and his signature by hand on each one. Both also contained color Xeroxes of the front and back covers of The Killers of Eden, the book that the documentary film is based on, and a postcard of the skeleton of Old Tom, the killer whale that was the leader of the pod. I have no idea how many of these letters he sent out, but I suspect it was quite a few."

Days before climbing that hill, Michels sat down to put all these packages together for dozens of people, meticulously personalizing each one. Then he sent them all off.

"Then, alone," Homer wrote, "with seemingly much to live for, and dozens of devoted friends, Doug climbed up to a whale observation point in Eden, and, leaving behind a world whose possibilities had become increasingly limited, finally found the future."

No, obituaries can't tell us everything. Of course, we can never know everything, either, no matter how close we are to someone, how well we think we may know them. Consider all those news stories where friends and neighbors and co-workers say things like, "We never expected it."

Was it an accident, in the end, that fall off the observation point? I certainly don't know, and it's not for me to speculate on. He was a confirmed bachelor after his divorce, but clearly lonely. Despite his boundless optimism, he had bouts of depression. Those things are all very human, and don't mean anything. He was clearly a fascinating and complex and lively character, a man who had seen and accomplished much more in his lifetime than most of us could ever dream of. In the end, those accomplishments are still mere obituary elements. Things you can point at and say "Here's something Doug Michels did."

Yet as Homer put it, "I can't help wondering who he was when he was alone."

Maybe his foot slipped while he was climbing to that observation point. Maybe he finally pushed himself too far. Who knows? For Michels, though, from what little I've come to know about him as a man, whatever those final circumstances, there was probably no more perfect end. As Homer put it: "Sunset at Eden Bay. Curtain Down. Finis."

Down in Amarillo, Stanley Marsh, the man who commissioned the Cadillac Ranch some 30 years ago, has decided to take those ten once-wildly decorated Cadillacs and paint them all black. And up here in New York, I'm grateful to Homer for giving me a chance to learn a little bit more about Doug.